Failed install and ruined USB drives

Hello, I am a diehard Linux user and was intrigued by BeOS years back and moreso by the news that Haiku was based on BeOS and resurrected. I downloaded the OS file, downloaded Etcher, and followed the instructions to make a bootable USB drive. Upon boot, I was faced with a black screen with no response from keys or mouse. Rebooted only to face the same issue. Well, I’m not one to give up, so thinking maybe the SanDisk USB drive was at fault, used a nearly new, proven PNY thumb drive. This time, it did not even boot. I decided to table the matter for another time, and went to reformat the two USB drives. Imagine my surprise when neither one is recognized by Linux Mint, Chrome OS, Windows Vista, or Windows 10.

I downloaded a 3rd party utility for Linux, and it found the drives and said they cannot be formatted because they are corrupted. I am not sure what went wrong, but having installed and run 30+ Linux distros off of USB drives without issue, I believe that the fault lies either with the Haiku OS itself or with the method used to make a thumb drive bootable. If anyone has experienced this and has a solution, I am willing to try it again, but not at the expense of yet another thumb drive. Thanks.

What do you mean exactly by ‘the drives are corrupted’? Is it just that the partition table isn’t recognized? Is it a more low-level problem?

Hi martyb,

In windows 10, launch diskpart (using the search tool). Select the disk you want to reinitialize (select disk n) and then clean it (command clean). Be careful not to delete the wrong disk. Then you might be able to create and format a new partition on your thumb drive (using disk manager).
Hope for you this will work.

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Hi, thanks for responding. It was the partition table that was corrupted on the larger drive and missing on the smaller. Both drives are recovered using Gparted in Linux. I just learned a bit more about how partitioning works :smiley: Thanks much.

Thank you, I was able to fix the drives’ partition tables through Linux Gparted (the Linux “diskpart”). Thanks for steering me in that direction. I am now a tiny bit smarter about partitions lol.

У меня была аналогичная проблема с флешками.Тоже не видели оси или всю флешку или ее часть.Пришлось скачать и запустить HDDLowLevelTools и отформатировать флешки с последующей инициализацией.Проблема была в том что некорректно читался и записывался ISO и IMG на флеш-накопители.

Google Translate to English of the above post by @Kandyman for the interested:

You don’t need specific tools to do this. Windows disk volume manager or gparted on Linux are enough to “fix” this.

Thank you all. I was able to restore the drives with gparted in Linux. Again, thanks for all the replies.